Moni...and welcome to my ongoing blog series about VMware ESXi5. In this section we will review working with Templates. I have broken this up into subsections due to the amount of optional steps that there are. In Section D we will go over the vSphere Client Linux Guest Customization Wizard.

You can get to this wizard one of three ways. You can clone and existing virtual machine, and select the option to Customize using the Customization Wizard. You can deploy a new VM from a template, and select the option to Customize using the Customization Wizard. And finally you can start the wizard by going into Home / Management / Customization Specification Manager and select New.

Once the Wizard is started the first screen is the Computer Name. You have 4 options for coming up with the Computer name. The first is to type in a name. You have a check box under this option to append a numerical value to make sure that each name is unique. I do not find this useful, unless is is a very small deployment.

Moni...and welcome to my ongoing blog series about VMware ESXi5. In this section we will review working with Templates. I have broken this up into subsections due to the amount of optional steps that there are. In Section C we will go over the vSphere Client Windows Guest Customization Wizard.

You can get to this wizard one of three ways. You can clone and existing virtual machine, and select the option to Customize using the Customization Wizard. You can deploy a new VM from a template, and select the option to Customize using the Customization Wizard. And finally you can start the wizard by going into Home / Management / Customization Specification Manager and select New.

Once the Wizard is started the first screen is the Registration Information. Fill in a Name and Organization that you would like to use repeatedly as you deploy VMs. I keep the name Generic, such as Admin or User, and then fill in the Organization. Once this is done Click Next.

Moni...and welcome to my ongoing blog series about VMware ESXi5. In this section we will review working with Templates. In Section A we went over moving the necessary sysprep files into the proper location. We also created our first template. In Section B we are going to deploy our first VM from a template.

If you are not already in the vSphere Client, open it up and go to Home / Inventory / VMs and Templates. As you can see this is a different view which does not show the host info. Right click on the template you created and select Deploy Virtual Machine from this Template...

Moni...and welcome to my ongoing blog series about VMware ESXi5. In this section we will review working with Templates. To start with we will copy over the sysprep files to vCenter. Then we will convert a VM to a template.

Templates are a great way to keep a standard build on your operating systems. By using a template you can make sure that many of the variables that can be messed up when doing a manual deploy are all set statically. It also allows you to deploy the server much faster, with all patches and updates already installed and configured.

The first thing that we are going to do is to copy over the Sysprep files onto the vCenter Server instance. VMware has a good KB article with more details on this here. This allows us to use the customization Wizard within vCenter when deploying the Windows based servers.

Buenas...and welcome to my ongoing blog on VMware ESXi5. In this edition we will be looking at VMFS. We will go through expanding a VMFS datastore.

In this blog we will be using a SAN that will allow us to expand the size of the LUN and then expand the size of the VMFS. In section A we will go over detaching the LUN from the ESXi host so that it can be expanded on the SAN side.

To start off with we will take a look at our LUN from the SAN side. On an Iomega SAN you log in and in the right panel select Storage. Then in the left panel select iSCSI. Then click on the -> in front of the LUN that you want to examine.

Buenas...and welcome to my ongoing blog on VMware ESXi5. In this edition we will be looking at VMFS. We will go through expanding a VMFS datastore.

In this blog we will be using a SAN that will allow us to expand the size of the LUN and then expand the size of the VMFS. In section A we went over detaching the LUN from the ESXi host this can be referenced here.

In section B we will go over expanding the LUN, re-attaching the LUN to the ESXi host and Expanding the VMFS file systems.

From the Web interface of the SAN go to Storage / iSCSI and then select the LUN that you want to work with. Click on the -> in front of Connected Clients to verify that the LUN is not currently in use.

Bon dia...and welcome to my ongoing blog about working with VMware ESXi5. In this post we are going to address vMotion and a common misconfiguration with vMotion. After a lot of setup we are now going to be able to start playing with some cool features.

You must also have your virtual machine running on shared storage that can be seen from both hosts. This is where the iSCSI LUN comes in useful. Once all of this is done you can vMotion from one host to another. We are going to troubleshoot an issue that may occur as well as show you how simple vMotion is when it is working.

Zdravejte... and welcome to my blog on how to add local administrators to a Server 2008 R2 Server. This is another side blog of basic Windows administration.

To get start you will need to log onto the server with an account that is already a local admin. If this server is in the domain. The Domain Admins group is automatically put into the local administrators group.

Once you are logged in launch the Server Manager. Expand the Configuration Section by clicking on the + in front of it. Expand the Local Users by clicking on the + in front of it and select the Groups folder by left clicking on it.